On Fri, Feb 13, 2015 at 6:06 AM, Michael Schwendt <mschwendt@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, 12 Feb 2015 16:49:13 -0500, Stephen Gallagher wrote: >> Ultimately, it's about one thing: Help get more software into Fedora >> without scaring people away. > > What is the background for this? Who has been scared away? Here's one review where the submitter worked very hard to jump through all the hoops until it came to the FPC bundling exception process. It's my opinion that Carlos would be a Fedora package maintainer today if that FPC process hadn't taken so long. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/682544 In IRC, I've seen other users abandon ship earlier, once the prospective developers are told that their goal of packaging X in Fedora or EPEL would require doing some work to unbundle some library. It's hardly a theoretical problem. I have no idea of the scope, of course, but it does happen. For myself, I believe in unbundling libraries, and I believe Linux distros like Fedora and Debian contribute a great deal to the health of the overall FOSS ecosystem. Certain upstream developers enjoy lambasting distributions regarding bundling policies, and I wish these same developers could step back and acknowledge how many patches and improvements have also come upstream as a result of the distros' work (unbundling work included). Matt, you mentioned in another email in this thread that upstreams don't care about the messages that we send. I agree that some upstreams don't care about certain classes of problems, but they do care about others. For example, XBMC hates that we've unbundled ffmpeg, but on the other hand, they're quite happy to take our patches to fix format-string bugs that Fedora's GCC defaults bring to light. Things are not all rosy, but they're not all bleak, either. Here's the new policy that I would vote for: 1) We allow bundled libraries, and each bundled library MUST have a virtual Provides: bundled(foo) in the RPM spec. (The packager SHOULD provide a version number too, with the admission that it is sometimes difficult to get this number correct.) 2) If another packager comes up with a patch to unbundle the library and files the patch in Bugzilla, then the package maintainer MUST take the patch. 3) If the package maintainer disagrees with the patch for whatever reason (maybe it's a feature regression, or whatever), they MUST bring it to the FPC for arbitration. The FPC must take into account the loss of functionality that unbundling could imply. This revised policy would lower the barrier to entry for newcomers, and still leave room for more advanced contributors to do the work if they desired to do so. - Ken -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
